It's A Guy Thing!

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“Too bad. You were really good. Why’d you quit?”

There was that word again. She looked away. Why had she given up something she’d loved so much? “I guess I got interested in other things.” It sounded lame, but then, excuses usually were.

“I know Amy really misses it.”

The words jerked her from the brink of her self-pity pool. Amy Walters had torn ligaments in both knees after a spectacular fall during a race shortly before Cassie left the team. “I’m sorry,” she said softly, remembering how her friend had laughed with joy as she flew down the slopes. Cassie had always admired Amy’s daring, and her sense of humor. She had a little green troll doll she pinned to her jumpsuit for good luck. She loved to play practical jokes of people, and had once filled an opponent’s ski boots with shaving cream. “Is she able to ski at all anymore?”

“She probably could, but when the trainer told her she’d never race again, she hung up her skis for good. I guess it hurt too much to give up her dream.”

At least Amy had a dream, Cassie thought. All she had were fleeting interests and her fantasies of Guy. She turned to look out the window facing the slopes. If someone had hung a sheet behind the glass, it wouldn’t have looked much whiter than it did now. No one was going anywhere for a while, why should they? They had food and drink and a nice warm fire. It was the perfect romantic setting.

With the wrong man.

She popped the last strawberry into her mouth and bit down hard. As if Bob was the right man.

“This is good champagne.” Guy tipped the last of it into her glass. “I’m glad we didn’t let it go to waste.”

He turned back to the fire and she risked looking at him again. Maybe the champagne wasn’t the only thing that shouldn’t go to waste this weekend.

He turned around and caught her staring at him. “Is something wrong?” he asked.

“No. Nothing’s wrong.” She suppressed a smile. In fact, everything was suddenly very right. For once in her life, she was going to follow through on a fantasy and make it reality. She was going to seduce Guy Walters, or die trying.

4

“I KNOW WHAT YOU NEED,” Guy said.

You do? Cassie blinked. Had he somehow read her mind? Did he know she was thinking of making love to him in front of that fire? They didn’t have a bearskin rug, but what the heck, a blanket would do.

“You need something to take your mind off things.” He stood. “Why don’t we play a game?”

“A game?” Her voice quavered. “What kind of game?” Strip poker? Spin the bottle? Doctor?

He went over to the cabinet in the corner and opened it. “How about Scrabble?”

Scrabble? She stared at him, stunned. She was going to spend the weekend with a Greek god and he wanted to play Scrabble?

He laid out the board on the coffee table between them and began turning over tiles. She sat back, arms crossed over her chest. Scrabble. What could be more tame? More conventional. He wouldn’t have invited Sarah Michelle Gellar or Catherine Zeta-Jones or some other sex goddess to play Scrabble, would he? But good old Cassie Carmichael was obviously a Scrabble kind of gal. The more she thought about it, the madder she became.

He dealt seven tiles to each of them and studied his own selection, handsome brow furrowed in thought. Had she been horribly wrong? Was sex god Guy Walters even duller than Boring Bob? She glanced at her tiles. K, S, T, C, L, M, I.

“You go first,” Guy said.

My, wasn’t he a gentleman? But she didn’t want him to be a gentleman. And for once, she wasn’t interested in being a lady. She idly rearranged the letters on her tray until a word formed. Ah, now here was something. Grinning, she laid the letters out on the board. L…I…C…K…S.

“Licks?” Guy looked up at her.

Making sure he got the idea, she ran her tongue over her lips. “That’s twenty-two points.”

SHE HAD THE MOST luscious mouth…. Guy quickly looked away and shifted in his seat, trying to get comfortable. How could someone who looked like an elementary school teacher—a very sexy elementary school teacher—be so seductive? If she kept this up, he’d have to go out in the snow to cool off.

He concentrated on the letter tiles in front of him. Selecting B, O and I, he arranged them over the L she’d played. “Boil,” he announced.

“It is a little warm in here, isn’t it?” Before he could offer to open a window or tamp down the fire, she stripped off her sweater, revealing some black satin confection obviously designed more to enhance than hide. He had an unimpeded view of smooth, ivory shoulders and the tops of full breasts. His mouth went dry and he jerked his gaze away, but his eyes didn’t want to obey and before he knew it he was looking at her again. He could clearly see her erect nipples pressed against the satiny material. He curled his fingers against his palm, fighting the urge to touch her.

“It’s your turn,” she said softly.

He looked down at the board. Without him even realizing it, she’d added a new word. “Naked,” he read. He swallowed, but his mouth was too dry for it to do much good. Anxious now to get this game over with as quickly as possible, he selected two letters and spelled the word nip.

Her eyes—they were a really pretty shade of green, he noticed—sparkled with laughter. She studied her letters again, head tilted so that her hair fell back from her neck, revealing a section of creamy flesh under her jaw. He’d like to kiss her there, to feel her pulse throbbing against his lips….

She leaned forward to place her letters on the board, her breasts straining against the satin lingerie. Did she know how wild that was making him? He glanced up and met her gaze, drawing him toward her….

“You look a little warm yourself,” she murmured, and reached across the table to unfasten the top two buttons of his shirt. She moved slowly, her fingers brushing against his suddenly feverish skin. She was right. It was burning up in here.

Obviously, Scrabble had been a bad idea. If he had any hope of keeping his hands off her, he needed to do something that would get him away from her entirely.

“I’d better get some more wood for the fire.” He jumped up and headed for the door.

“Wait! We’re not finished with our game.” Cassie rose up on her knees, as if to follow him.

“I just remembered, they lock the wood room at dark.” He grabbed his coat from the closet and was out the door before she could talk him into staying.

What had he gotten himself into? He’d tried to do the right thing, helping out a friend who’d just been jilted by a jerk. The problem was, his own attraction to Cassie kept getting in the way of his honorable intentions. The last thing he wanted was for her to think he was the kind of man who’d take advantage of her distress.

At the bottom of the stairs he pushed through the door to the outside and headed for the woodpile at the edge of the trees. There were plenty of split logs in the wood room, which as far as he knew never closed, but he needed fresh air to clear his head and cool off his heated libido. One thing for certain—this was going to be a very long night.

CASSIE STARED after Guy’s retreating figure. So much for her career as a femme fatale. Could she help it if Scrabble wasn’t the most erotic game in history?

Sighing, she plucked her sweater from the chair and pulled it on. She didn’t have much experience at seduction, but she could have sworn Guy was really turned on for a minute there. What had happened to turn him off?

She went into the bathroom and studied her face in the mirror. Between the snow and the champagne and her fury at Bob, her makeup and hair were a little worse for wear, but she didn’t think she looked bad enough to drive a man out into the snow. No, something else had sent Guy running in the other direction.

She opened the medicine cabinet, hoping to find a bottle of aspirin. Champagne always gave her a headache. Why didn’t she ever remember that before it was too late?

A half-full bottle of ibuprofen sat next to a bottle of prescription cough syrup on the middle shelf. She read the name on the cough syrup, Amy Walters.

Did Guy’s sister have anything to do with his reluctance to take things any further with Cassie? Did he think making it with his kid sister’s friend was bad form?

Or did the fact that Cassie and Amy weren’t such good friends anymore put him off? She shook two ibuprofen into her hand and replaced the bottle in the cabinet. Maybe it didn’t have anything to do with Amy at all. Maybe Guy was simply a nice man who didn’t want to get involved with a woman who so obviously wasn’t his type.

Her reflection in the mirror wore a lopsided smile. It figured. The one time in her life she was ready to settle for no-commitment sex, she met a decent man who didn’t want to take advantage.

WHEN GUY RETURNED with an armload of freshly split logs, he found Cassie curled up on the sofa, eyes closed. He eased the wood into the washtub, then crept over to her. She’d put her sweater back on, and taken off her boots, revealing black socks embroidered with little pink bows. A lock of hair had fallen across her cheek and he resisted the urge to smooth it back into place.

Now that she was asleep, he felt at ease to watch her, to let his eyes linger on the soft curve of her cheek or the rounded shape of her hip. A few hours ago, he’d been working on a serious case of the blues, dreading a weekend by himself, half afraid he’d spend the rest of his life alone. Then this woman had knocked on his door and changed the way he thought about the weekend, maybe even the way he thought about the rest of his life.

He reached down and pulled an afghan over her. Cassie snuggled against the pillow. “Thanks,” she murmured.

“I didn’t mean to wake you,” he said.

“That’s all right.” She yawned and rolled over onto her back to look up at him. “I was lying here thinking, and I must have drifted off.”

He sat down on the edge of the sofa. “What were you thinking about?”

The fire crackled as a log settled, and outside the window the wind howled. Cassie closed her eyes and didn’t say anything.

“I did a lot of thinking while I was chopping wood, too,” he said. He rubbed his hands together, trying to keep from touching her.

Her eyes flew open. “Oh?”

“I was thinking about why I came up here this weekend.”

“Why is that?” Her voice was soft, breathy, like a caress.

“I was trying to figure out my life. What I wanted.” A thought popped into his head, like a neon sign glowing bright, that what he wanted was Cassie. He quickly pushed it aside. He hardly knew the woman. How could she be the answer to the restlessness that had plagued him?

She sat up and swung her feet to the floor. Her shoulder brushed his, but he didn’t move away. “I guess I came up here for pretty much the same reason,” she said.

Jealousy pricked at him, sharp and painful. He didn’t like remembering that she’d come here to be with another man.

As if reading his thoughts, she turned her head to look at him. “This weekend wasn’t really about Bob,” she said. “I didn’t want to admit it to myself, but I think I knew things were over between us.” She smoothed the afghan across her lap. “I told myself I was coming here to try to salvage our relationship, but I think I really wanted to prove to myself that I could do something daring. Something different.”

“You mean this isn’t how you usually spend your spare time?”

He purposely made the words teasing.

She looked away from him, at the fire. “When you first saw me at the coffee shop, what did you think?”

He smiled, remembering. “I thought my kid sister’s friend had certainly grown up.” He watched her out of the corner of his eye as he spoke. “I wanted to ask you out.”

She stared at him. “You didn’t.”

“Yeah, I did.” He laced his fingers together, wanting to reach for her but afraid she’d pull away. “I didn’t know what Amy would think of it and before I could ask her, I heard you were already involved with someone.”

Sadness shadowed her eyes. “Do you think Amy wouldn’t approve of you going out with me?”

He took her hand in his then, unable to stop himself any longer. “Do you?”

Cassie held herself still, not pulling away from him, but not moving toward him either. “We didn’t exactly part on good terms.”

He tried to remember when Amy and Cassie had ceased to be friends, but he couldn’t pin it down to a specific date. Cassie had stopped coming around and Amy had never mentioned her again. “What happened?”

She shrugged. “She didn’t approve of my quitting the team.”

“Was this after her accident?”

She nodded. “She was still in a wheelchair, after her surgery, but she came to team meetings and watched films and helped coach everybody.” She looked at him, eyes glistening. “It was so hard seeing her like that. I thought she’d understand when I told her I couldn’t race anymore.”

He squeezed her hand, fighting a knot in his own throat. He’d cried for his sister once, but it had been a long time ago. “But she didn’t.”

She hung her head. “No. She told me I was settling for being ordinary, when I could have been extraordinary.”

He cupped her chin and turned her head until their eyes met. “I think you’re pretty extraordinary.”

“No, I’m not. I’m a quiet, ordinary, even timid person. I’m the kind of person other people take for granted.” Her eyes darkened, her expression intense. “But sometimes, I feel like there’s so much more. Like there’s this other side of me trying to get out—a person who’s daring and exciting. A person no one would ever take for granted.” She frowned. “Does that make any sense?”

“Yeah. Yeah, it makes a lot of sense.” He squeezed her hand. “Maybe this other side of you just needs a little encouraging.”

“I don’t know how to do that.” The sadness in her voice tore at him.

He pulled back and looked at her intently. “Was there ever anything you really wanted to do in your life, but you never did it?”

She looked puzzled. “What do you mean?”

He thought a moment, trying to find the right words. “Something like…well, even when I was in high school, I wanted to own my own business. Something to do with adventure and the outdoors. I was still in college when I started going around to banks, trying to get financing for a store that would offer all sorts of outdoor gear. Everyone said I was crazy—I was too young, I had no experience. But it was my dream, and I didn’t let what others said stop me.”

She nodded. “And now your store’s a big success and everyone’s saying you’re a genius.”

“Not everyone. But I’m proud I didn’t let others talk me out of my dream.” He cradled her hands between both his own, savoring the smoothness of her skin. “Now it’s your turn. What’s your dream that hasn’t come true yet?”

She thought a moment, obviously reluctant. “Well…I want to be a massage therapist. I mean, it’s something I really think I’ll stick with.”

“So you’re already doing that. What else? What haven’t you done yet that you want to do?”

She furrowed her brow. “I wish now I hadn’t given up racing.”

“Why did you? Because you were afraid of getting hurt?”

She shook her head. “No. I think that was just an excuse.”

“Then why?”

She worried her lower lip between her teeth. “My mother had been after me for a while to give it up.” She ducked her head, but not before he read the hurt in her eyes. “She said it was selfish to waste so much time and energy on something I’d never be able to make a living at.”

Cassie selfish? Admittedly, he didn’t know her that well, but he couldn’t picture her as selfish.